


The Sweet Logic of Bullets

by Jenwryn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Asexuality, Established Relationship, F/F, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-04
Updated: 2010-12-04
Packaged: 2017-10-13 12:52:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/137567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenwryn/pseuds/Jenwryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jo understands it, yes, but she still suspects it might dissolve her from the inside out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sweet Logic of Bullets

**Author's Note:**

> Note: Girl!John is Jo in this one. Yes, I can't make up my mind about her name. Also, I originally wrote this back in October, which wasn't the best of months.
> 
> Warnings: asexual!Sherlock (if that, indeed, for some absurd reason, requires a warning), and me writing the way that I do (which more assuredly requires a warning!).
> 
> Priscilla Ahn's cover of ["Opportunity to Cry"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oQ-g3aHDTA) was the soundtrack to writing, and editing, this piece.

Sherlock's trimming her nails by the streetlight, long fingers moving with an easy precision. Her face is resting against the glass of the window and she leans forwards, just a little, just a bit; the motion slips a strand of hair – short, tangled – onto the plane of her cheek. Sherlock is yawning, and as close to oblivious as she can manage, and she's rubbing an ankle with a heel, and she's pretty much _perfect_.

Jo Watson looks at Sherlock Holmes, you know, she does, and that's all she can see: perfection. Oh, it’s a wild perfection, shot with strands of cruelty and genius, but that doesn’t change anything. It enhances it. Sherlock is perfect like marble and alabaster, like clear water in crystal. She’s unbendable. Unbreakable. Asexual.

The facts are not connected but, still.

Asexual.

Jo plays the term over in her mind, again, and again, on repeat, like a song caught in her stomach. She’s a medical woman. She’s a rational woman. She’s an accepting woman. She knows asexuality exists. She knows, too, that it isn’t some kind of quirk, some kind of anomaly, some kind of thing that she can cure. Or vanquish.

More importantly, of course, that it doesn’t need curing in the first place. Or, well, vanquishing.

Sherlock Holmes tips her head back against the window. Pulls a pack of fags from her pocket. Taps the end of one against her bare knee; lights, inhales, smiles slowly. She doesn’t look to Jo for permission, which means she already knows that she has it. Sherlock is too clever the good of either of them.

The detective brushes her hair from her face. Dark curls shift and dance, languid at the bones of Sherlock’s wrists.

It’s the first time Jo hasn’t lectured her Significant Other on the fine art of clear breathing. The first time she hasn't even wanted to.

Oh, Jo _gets_ the reality of it. She understands the things that Sherlock doesn’t need. The things that Sherlock doesn’t want. Jo respects it, too. Intends, fully and completely, from the nails on her own toes, to the hair on her own head, to honour the boundaries it sets. Jo is, after all, a good woman. The right woman. And it isn’t as though Sherlock doesn’t love her, love her back just as much as Jo does.

There are days, though. Hours. Minutes. Seconds; painful seconds, when Jo thinks – when Jo knows, with a certainty as sound as the gun in the drawer by the kettle – that there's a very good chance it might dissolve her from the inside out. The ache of it. The loss of it. The willing, caring choosing of it.

Sherlock’s gaze, as she opens her eyes and looks at Jo across the darkening room – smoke softening the space between them, something like love and something like regret – says that Sherlock knows it too.

“A nice murder,” declares Jo, putting on the cheerful voice of their beloved landlady. “That’s what we need. A nice little murder. Or arson, perhaps. Nothing like a decent dose of impossible arson.”

Sherlock laughs, low and curling.

It’s only later, beneath the sheets of the bed that they share—

(kisses and hands, and Jo can get off if she wants to, but more often than not she finds she doesn’t, because it wasn’t what she’d hoped for; oh, it’s good, it’s great – Sherlock’s amazing clever hands, deigning out of some misguided sense of wanting to help out – but it’s not the same, it’s not, it isn’t, not when Jo's desire is for Sherlock's body, gasping beneath Jo’s mouth; for Sherlock's thighs, soft against the press of Jo's ears; for _Sherlock_ , tumbling into trembling)

—it's only later, beneath the sheets of the bed that they share, that Jo realises she’s said _we_ instead of _you_.

A nice little death, that’s what they need, after all.

Jo looks at the ceiling, and wonders whether Sally might have been right, about murder and such, but simply directing her ire in the wrong direction.

Jo looks at the lines of Sherlock’s back, beautiful in the mostly-dark.

Jo doesn’t think about the gun, in the drawer by the kettle. She doesn’t think about how easy it would be for the pair of them – guns and blood and brilliant madness – how easy that would be, compared to the complications of the rest.

Doesn’t think about the sweet logic of bullets, in contrast to the fey temptation of hips.

Closes her eyes, and doesn’t _think_.

The next time Sherlock pulls out her cigarettes, Jo takes one, and lets the smoke merge.


End file.
